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it's thirty two minutes past the hour welcome to the business program on r t with me. well russia's resort city of sochi is getting ready to host the twenty fourteen olympic games it's still one year to go to the event but it's already being dubbed the most expensive olympic games in history and of course the big question is is it really worth it so i've got kiddie pool being here with me to discuss this in detail so is it really worth it for that is the question indeed but i would have to

say yes because it's not about the money it's about the legacy of russia or it's about the history of the country it's about the future as well for the people in sochi russia as a whole and in terms of course the reason why it's cost so much is because eighty five percent of the infrastructure had to be done from scratch so that's where the cost of gods we've got raul words tunnels going through the mountains we've got power plants as well all those calls them talking about part of russia on the stage three point five billion people will be watching and when you're a foreigner you think of russia you think of the red square you think of the kremlin you think of the beautiful historic picture arrests of pieces about but not necessarily so really opening up on a on a grand scale theater tatar right but i mean i understand the need to showcase of russia to showcase sochi but fifty billion dollars that's a lot of money and not all the winter olympic games are one profitable actually you

know we saw a vancouver and making some money and before that there are precedents as well the summer games we saw salt lake city making more than one hundred million dollars i mean that's peanuts compared to fifty billion you're still going to make any money in sochi any well it's not a foul up though it really isn't about making money but i would say that the local businesses the cafes the restaurants the small businesses they will make money you know it's all about the multiplier effect people are going to bring money into the system and spend it like. and that's what it's all about particularly serious to wally this infrastructure these roads they're not just going to be for the games of course for the sports but they will be felt decades potentially centuries to come so it's really an investment here so you're basically talk of attracting tourists is what kind of tourists are we talking about here is it like domestic tourists from within russia because i really doubt that europeans considering the abundance of both winter and summer resorts over in europe they're going to be coming to sochi well that's the long term goal but i think at the moment it's all about

tapping into the domestic market here in russia and it's today we spoke to michael seaman off he's a c.e.o. overnight of us and he's actually in the middle of building the biggest hotel in europe and he said that's exactly what he intends today on believe that the airlines are going to decrease the few the fares and the russian internal tourism is going to take off here it's going crease for many reasons i doubt that we're going to have a lot of international. destinations being attracted here but domestic travel is definitely going to pick up because so many russians are just not going anywhere and there is a category of russians were traveling internationally but it's still not more than ten percent so if there is a serious number of russians who just prefer to stay in their own country and if you imagine that the airline fares go two times three times lower it's very convenient to come here two three hour flight and you don't have to cross the

border drones but you're not spending time on the on the. border control so the offering all in all is going to be attractive for sure. they have it the domestic market is very much on the radar the moment for investors in sochi for one of the reasons i mean one of the ways of making money is by overcharging the potential spectators right we're running the risk of seeing well apparently not according to the committee of sochi that organizes the ticket some of the prices of recently just come out and forty two percent of them will be below one hundred dollars and actually below its price there may be students who want to get involved in the action that we seventeen dollars up for grabs so that's reasonable and actually looking at the cost significantly lower than that of the final of the ice hockey match which is probably the most sought after ticket in town will be thirty percent lower than the q one and also if you fancy going to see the displays of the ceremony that will cost you two hundred dollars well that's actually not so bad but

i mean so ok we're just trying to get a hold of the money situation you know trying to control the money but can we control the weather vancouver definitely have problems with that so do we have that planned out now i would say no because who can ever plan the weather you know i mean that's just something. but having said that they're all concerns there's going to be maybe too much snow or not enough because at the moment which is rather mild but there is apparently according to plan a big snow machine plan go out there and like more money well yeah potentially you're not a sports fan are you well i do like like ice skating always proud of them. that's for sure you look pretty in their dresses for sure. ok and moving on in a widely anticipated move the european central bank on thursday left the interest rate unchanged at a record low over zero point seven five percent of course on the one hand the recent data shows europe is on its way to economic recovery which is easing the

need for more rate cuts but on the other hand the rising euro actually hurts european. exports that makes the region's economy all less competitive so far the e.c.v. has been resisting the pressure to bring down the value of the euro earlier on thursday i asked steam jacobson chief economist at saxo bank in copenhagen what he thinks of the e.c.b. policies here's what he said mentioned that the details should be left to the euro is up three and a half percent that will cost europe in growth terms net point three percent of growth in an economy which is already almost tail spinning the actual underlying economy as represented by german g.d.p. was more negative than expected the spanish one was minus point seven so i think we are back with the same picture again that you know the market is having a party but the real economy is still going from bad to worse. and it's time now to take a look at the markets over in the states where the trade is pretty active the sour

equities are shedding value following a couple of pretty upbeat days and that's despite the fact that there are some positives that's coming out like the weekly jobless claims that came in better than expected actually europe its shares ended the session mixed we saw quite a correction on the footsie down more than one percent as you can see right there but the dax closed above the line here in moscow the equities did manage to withstand the pressure from abroad both indices close of the session in the red and on the currency markets the euro fell ever so slightly against the dollar the russian ruble closed mixed to both major currencies as you can see right there and not pull the latest from us and business coming up next it's our interview where we talk to the former cia officer and whistleblower in torture john kiriakou and that's just ahead for you after a short break. limitation

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john kiriakou with me today a former cia official who blew the whistle on the agency's torture practices after nine eleven john kiriakou served as the chief of counterterrorist operations in pakistan mistaken are always reportedly praise at the agency for his will in the capture of abu zubaydah who back in two thousand and two was thought to be third in command and now years later john kerry is heading to prison he was just sentenced to. two and a half years in jail mr getting out with thank you so much for coming thanks for having me i really appreciate it i know that time is of much value to you and your

family now before you. find yourself behind bars. you were convicted of revealing the identity of an agent or freelance reporter who by the way never even published it you said you were greenwich sharing the name of the agent of the officer and your policy for it but you also said it was not why the government went after you why do you think the government went after you i have i have never believed that my case was about a leak i have always believed that my case is about torture when i went on a.b.c. news in december two thousand and seven and i said that not only was the cia torturing prisoners but that the torture policy was an official u.s. government policy that was approved at the very top by the president of the united states himself. the cia filed what's called a crimes reported against me the next day with the justice department the justice

department never stopped investigating me from december of two thousand and seven until i was finally arrested in january of two thousand and twelve so to say that this that this case is a result of a name that was found in a in a an attorney's brief at guantanamo is just simply not true that they were looking for something that they were going for something to pin on me what i find most gracious about your case is had you been actually accused of torture of human rights violations you wouldn't have gone to jail know. they they would dismiss any accusation because the u.s. government has classified everything related to its torture practices but yet you go to prison because he talked about it why do you think this administration president obama who signed an executive order to stop torture at the very beginning of his first term why do you think he's protecting folks from the previous

administration most people don't realize this but president obama has surrounded himself with the same intelligence advisors who advised president bush through most of the first term the cia had the same deputy director that bush had the same director of operations that bush had john brennan who is president obama's new designee to be the cia director and until what a week ago or so was the deputy national security adviser was under president bush the director of the national counterterrorism center and up to his eyeballs in torture policy so even though we changed presidents there was really no change of intelligence advisors at least not on counterterrorism john brennan you mentioned john brennan and i want to ask you about him the future head of the cia what kind of a cia chief is he going to be in your opinion i think he's going to be somebody who will be extremely aggressive. and who will probably be comfortable.

walking on the edge of the law you worked with him i did i worked with john brennan for many years and i know him pretty well mr kaplan you yourself supported torture before you were against it what happened what changed your position well let me correct you on that and this is something that that i think most americans missed in my original n.b.c. interview i was trying to draw a distinction between whether torture was right and wrong or whether it worked i believed it was wrong and i called it torture and i said that torture was official policy that's on the one side on the other side the cia had told us internally at the time that it was working what year was that that was in two thousand to two thousand and three they were telling us that it was working we now know from the inspector general's report that was released in the spring of two thousand and nine that that was a lie that the cia was lying even to those of us inside the cia and i think it was

just to protect themselves and to protect the policy but it never worked. did you have a personal experience related to torture are you personally involved in torture no thank god i was never a person involved in torture when i returned from pakistan in the early summer of two thousand and two where i had been chief of counterterrorism operations i was asked by a senior officer in the cia's counterterrorist center if i wanted to be trained in in the use of these torture techniques and i said no i had a moral problem with it and i didn't want to be associated with it there were fourteen of us at the time who were. made the offer two of us said no and then one of us not me the other guy changed his mind so i was the only one who was made the offer who declined. because at that time you

already believe that it wouldn't work i just thought i didn't know if it would work i mean they were telling us it would but i just believed it was wrong you know it at the cia part of the cia's culture is to couch all issues in shades of grey you have to be very comfortable working in morally nebulous situations or legally nebulous situations but there are some things that really are black and white and i believed that that was a black and white issue there's something that i think you will find interesting and something that i'd like you to comment on polls by the american red cross show that the majority of americans find torture acceptable sixty percent of young people agree whereas four years ago torture was largely condemned in the us. how did this become thing in normal what happened in those four years i think that many people who told pollsters in the early or middle part of the last decade were

reacting to president bush little by little president obama adopted most of president bush's counterterrorism policies and just because he happens to be a nobel peace prize winner barack obama most americans who haven't paid much attention have just bought in. i think it's a question of education here domestically people need to be informed that hollywood have a role to play i think hollywood had a role to play i think that zero dark thirty for example did a grave disservice to counterterrorism zero dark thirty perpetuates this grand lie that torture led to the the. the killing of osama bin laden it's just simply not true myths often become history one comedian here said movies it was about zero dark thirty about the way it's serious movies is where

americans learned their history it's true what myths what other myths do you see being perpetuated now related to the war on terror i think one of the great myths and i chuckle to myself because it always seemed so ridiculous to me was president bush's statement that they hate us because we love freedom. i know al qaeda i've captured al qaeda fighters i've had conversations sitting across the table like i am with you with al qaeda leaders and i can tell you from firsthand personal experience that the reason people take up arms against us is because of a lack of education yet that i understand that the united states can't educate the whole wall no we can't but we can we can help other countries develop an infrastructure so that they can educate themselves coming more and more about your encounters with those what are their impressions did you have the first kind of fighter i ever caught was in one thousand year old boy from tunisia and the only

reason he went to afghanistan was because he had nothing else to do he had no skills and no way of making a living and he wanted to get married so the local in mom said if you want to make some money you know what you should do you should go to afghanistan and make jihad against the americans if you do that i know somebody who will pay your family five hundred dollars and. you can use that for a dowry and you can you can get a wife so this kid had nothing against the united states he had never even really thought about the united states so from your experience you saw no ideology i saw it very little you see ideology and some of the older fighters some of the leaders the camp commanders for example sure there's ideology there but in my short time in pakistan i captured fifty two al-qaeda fighters i can count on one hand the number of people who were real ideologues who really were there for jihad who were really there to kill americans three out of fifty two the perception of one condiment two

has gone a long way since two thousand and eight when he was a burning and a highly controversial issue most recently you know the state department has shut down the office that was working to shut down the guantanamo prison is that this administration's way of saying. forget about guantanamo let's move on i think it is i think it is again where's the outrage the american people really don't care if kuantan the most open or closed this administration it appears decided not to bother about interrogations kuantan prisoners and all that and just to bomb whoever seems suspicious withdrawals what do you think about this administration's no prisoners policy we find ourselves murdering people in many cases children with no evidence whatsoever that they're involved in any criminal or terrorist activity and what this does is it encourages other people to take up arms against

us john brennan the architect of the drone program basically and it was last year i think when he claimed that u.s. drone strikes caused no civilian deaths in pakistan over the prior year which was an outright lie by so many accounts do you think we're going to see more transparency with regards to drones with john brennan at the helm of the cia no. no i don't with john brennan. secrecy is the key word. unless of course you know if he chooses to leak for the benefit of the administration what did you expect when you decided to go public to come clean on on on torture at the cia i mean your wife worked at the cia and she was fired because of him and your father of five and you're going to prison what future did you envision for yourself

five years ago. i didn't envision prison in my future five years ago i expected there to be a national debate on whether or not we wanted to use torture as an official u.s. policy now i'm very happy proud actually that i played a role in that debate and now the law of the land is that torture is illegal i'm very proud of that i frankly didn't expect that the government would would go after me so relentlessly i stood in the snow for two hours to vote for president obama i really believed that this was a positive change i believed that he deserved that nobel peace prize or only because i expected things to change so dramatically at the beginning of his first term so no i never believed i would be going to prison under a president obama never. that's been i think my biggest disappointment

but you haven't seen a dramatic change i haven't seen any change no he's not torture he stopped torture sure but in terms of counterterrorism policy i think the obama administration is largely an extension of the bush administration. and stick it out with thank you for the interview i wish all the best thanks very much for having me. well. science technology innovation all the least developed mints from around russia we've got the future covered.

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if. the thief. if he feels. the need to eat. six. guitar sometimes you see a story and it seems so for life you think you understand it and then you glimpse something else you hear or see some other part of it and realize that everything you thought you knew you don't know i'm tom harpur welcome to the big fish. for once. walk.

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